Global Advocacy

Building Capacity as a migrant and refugee sector, to reclaim the agenda of Migration and Development and Human Rights

We, as migrant networks and civil society organizations, respond to the various international, European and national developments that are impacting heavily on the daily lives on migrant and refugee communities in Europe and of the peoples in the South. We mobilise our communities and intervene actively to reclaim the agenda of migration and development in our hands. We are taking the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and The UN International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families or the UN Migrants’ Convention (Migrant Convention or MC)as departure pointsand the perspective of migrants and refugees, as a key players in active and responsible citizenship in the North and in the South.

UN High Level Dialogue on International Migration, Development and Human Rights, Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and Peoples Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA)

We, as migrant and refugee, communities living in Europe, welcomed the United Nations initiative to hold a High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development (New York, 2006) in this vision. We have also participated in each subsequent meeting of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) (2007–2012) bothinside and outside the formal government processes. Inside we took partin the limited space provided by governments to raise migrants' rights issues ‘inside’. Outside, we participated together with Migrant Rights International (MRI) and Migrant Forum Asia (MFA) in the Peoples Global Action (PGA) in the form of parallel events and street demonstrations. We aim to maximize the spaces provided by the PGA and Civil Society Days (CSD)/GFMD and other international arenas to advocate migrant priorities, in Europe. Therefore Transnational Migrant Platform, (TMP) initiated the process of an annual Europe-Wide Conference on the substantive agenda of the GFMD, and at the same time to contribute to the development of new social movements and networks that go beyond PGA and CSD/GFMD.